


Escape

by Severina



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Community: hc_bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2013-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-04 22:00:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1086155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Severina/pseuds/Severina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's not the child she was two years ago, hiding beneath her covers and letting her father sing her a nonsense song from when she was a baby.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Escape

**Author's Note:**

> Post Episode 408. Written for LJ's hc_bingo for the prompt "loss of home/shelter"
> 
> * * *

"Don't look," Daryl says.

But she's not the child she was two years ago, hiding beneath her covers and letting her father sing her a nonsense song from when she was a baby. She's not the child who would rather slit her own wrist than face her fears. She's not even the girl who believed in faeries and doodled hearts in her schoolbooks and pretended she was in love with Jimmy so that the things they snuck off to the barn to do didn't seem so bad.

She's a woman now. And her father is dead, never again to sing about stupid doodlebugs.

Beth scans the faces of every walker she passes, every victim on the ground. She sees Michael, who travelled all the way from Seattle only to find the CDC a shattered ruin. Daryl found him on the road six months ago, barefoot and raving; fed him and gave him water and brought him back to the prison where he found a home and people who cared about him. Now he lays dead on the concrete with a walker hunched over him and his intestines pooled around him in the dirt, and she stops and sights on his forehead and puts him down so he'll never have to walk around like that, lurching and moaning and dragging his own internal organs behind him.

She doesn't find her sister. She doesn't find Glenn or Rick or the baby that she's almost come to think of as her own.

She stops at the top of the rise, partly to catch her breath and partly to look back at her home one last time. From her viewpoint the holes blown into the walls are ragged pits, leering open mouths with jagged teeth. She can no longer see the long green stalks of the plants in the fields, now trampled by the dozens of walkers spilling into the prison yard. She can't tell if the tiny figures milling outside the cell blocks are walkers or survivors, can't tell if anyone else made it out. 

Beth smells the geek before she hears him, spins and pulls out her knife. He's still two steps away, and she takes in the broken ribs protruding through rotting skin and the snarling, snapping teeth even as she lunges forward. Her knife slides through the spongy mass of his skull like butter, and she dances back as he falls, already scanning the edge of the woods for more. There's always more.

When the second pushes through the undergrowth she's in her stance and ready, but the arrow pierces the walker's skull before she can move. She looks up to find Daryl at the edge of the tree line, slotting another bolt into the bow.

He waves an arm, looks over his shoulder into the woods and then back at her. "C'mon!" he yells.

Beth nods, pushes her hair back from her face. Looks one last time at the broken prison below, dust from the shattered walls hanging in the air, walkers stumbling around like wind-up dolls. 

Then she moves on.


End file.
